Cloud Apps Flawed?

DCodd

I am recieving more and more documents from smaller suppliers using Google Docs etc. I am being told that this is the "future".

Have I completely misunderstood the concept of "Cloud" based Apps? Surely they need a reliable, constant and uninterupted internet connection? Can it really be a better system than having physical access to your servers?

BargainGalore

I think M$ are going down this route in the near future

I think thats a bitter war going on here between google and M$

bob_a_builder

In just the same way as you are going to " need a reliable, constant and uninterupted " access to your physical servers

But then there are many more possibilities to connect to the internet than just via your own ISP

Plus at the remote end, it'll probably be fault tolerant, i.e. just a VMware image that can be moved to another server at any hint of a h/w failure
Plus back up/recovery should be pretty strong too

but of course you'ed need to check those points, but no doubt some wil prefer to be in complete control of their own data

Marty_J

You can access Google Docs without a web connection.

I use Google Calendar, and it works brilliantly. It syncs with iCal on my Mac and on my iPod Touch, and when I change the calendar on one, it updates it on all the others. It works much better than storing it locally.

DCodd

bob_a_builder wrote: »

In just the same way as you are going to " need a reliable, constant and uninterupted " access to your physical servers

Yes but that is just a keyboard, mouse and monitor.

bob_a_builder

Yes but that is just a keyboard, mouse and monitor.

It might be if it was a 'thin client/citrix' setup, but someone in the IT dept ( or you) would still have to be looking after 'your physical servers'

DCodd

I am probably a bit over cautious when it comes to internet based apps. We had (recently) a problem with our internet connection at the exchange and it took BT 6 weeks to fix! We did at that stage have an option of piggy backing our internet via the tennants internet line but they have moved out of the spare office space so that is not an option now! I know we should have a second Adsl line and we do have the option of a second Mako box as backup but getting funding for a dormant internet connection is proving difficult from powers that be.

The question is, if the internet connection went down would we still be able to access the apps locally?

Marty_J

DCodd wrote: »

The question is, if the internet connection went down would we still be able to access the apps locally?

As I pointed out above, yes, you would.

lwbe

Fact of the matter is: physical storage breaks. Cloud storage is much, much harder to lose.

Of course you could always use both - open stuff in a word processor and copy/paste it to Google docs and save a copy there...

mr_fishbulb

lwbe wrote: »

Fact of the matter is: physical storage breaks. Cloud storage is much, much harder to lose.

It's still stored on physical storage in the cloud

Enterprises will have built in redundancy, error control, fault tolerance, virtual SANs, clustering, RAID, yada yada yada to protect themselves against hardware failure, the same as cloud service providers. The average home user does not becuase the value of their information does not justify the additional cost.

For a business it offers other benefits such as a better licensing model, SLAs on uptime.

lwbe

You're right, of course. I just wanted to point out that to the average home user cloud storage is more secure as the companies handling the cloud can afford some almighty protection, backup etc, whereas most people (or even small companies) won't have the time or money for anything like that.